I Scanned the Mystery QR Code

Somebody put up a poster. The poster has eight words and a QR code.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

The eight words say: YOU MAY NEVER SEE THIS AGAIN. JUST SCAN.

No title. No logo. No brand. Nothing about what the code is for. Just the dare, and the code, waiting.

You already know what I did. Everyone knows what they would do. That is the entire design.

I took the poster home as a photo and decoded it properly. The code points to a redirect link, and the redirect lands on an App Store page for an app called “Lume - The Daily Dating Game.”

So the mystery poster is guerrilla marketing for a dating app. And it worked on me completely. I photographed the ad. I carried it home. I decoded it with tools. I told people about it. Now I am writing a blog post about it, for free, which makes me the ad’s most productive unpaid employee.

If the poster had said “Download our dating app!” in friendly letters, I would have walked past it like furniture. Instead it refused to say what it was selling. Every word on it is about me, not the product: my curiosity, my fear of missing the thing. A poster like that is a question, and a question follows you home.

Whoever you are, Lume marketing person: good poster. I am still not downloading the app.